Never doubted for their enthusiasm, courgette plants grow like they own your garden. They produce large leaves hiding a small network of fleshly stems growing courgettes. Inspect them often as courgettes have a habit of turning into marrows if left too long. You can typically get 16 courgettes from one plant  (or four marrows). They [...]

Speedy, but lesson known Chinese cabbages are a lovely delicacy for summer sowing and autumn harvest – up to mid November when cloches are put over to protect from oncoming cold. They produce handsome hearts of compact leaves. Even the stumps want to help, regrowing a bonus leaf crop if left. The trick is having [...]

July is the last month to sow this lovely looking veg. Kohl Rabi isn’t well known, but boasts tasty  green or brilliantly purple swollen bases to harvest, ready in as little as eight weeks after growing in pots or your garden allotment. Harvest when golf ball size for best flavour and pluck off leaves too [...]

This lovely perennial veg needs a couple of years to get going, but will yield happily every spring thereafter. Few can deny the enthusiasm of asparagus. They spend mid April to mid June producing tender, delicious shoots that we pluck off for a light steaming. The trick though is leaving plants alone afterwards to let [...]

Runner beans enjoy the month of May. Now is the time when these ambitious plants are sown, either indoors for planting out when the danger of frost has past* or direct outside, again after the last frost. Either way, once off, they’ll scramble up nearby canes with long stems and their enthusiastic leaves that precede [...]